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Home of The Saturday Evening PostTue, 31 Mar 2015 20:00:36 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1The Facebook Generationhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/03/22/health-and-family/tech/facebook-generation.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/03/22/health-and-family/tech/facebook-generation.html#commentsMon, 22 Mar 2010 17:20:31 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=20119No longer relegated to hip college students trying to find dates, the Facebook community now includes everyone from 20-something celebrities to grandmothers and sewing circles. Is it for you?

]]>Facebook, over the past year, has reached a critical mass. No longer relegated to hip college students trying to find dates, the Facebook community now includes everyone from 20-something celebrities to grandmothers and sewing circles.

As a 20-something myself, I thought it would be interesting to profile the ways in which Facebook is changing how my generation communicates with friends and family.

I am part of the first generation that will never long for a high school reunion; Facebook has made it more difficult for me to lose track of old acquaintances. Whenever I go on Facebook, I see a stream of all the things my friends are currently doing. Even if I don’t speak to them for three months at a time, there’s still a “connection.”

In the past, this type of passive communication on a mass scale was impossible. If I wanted to stay connected to a group of 15 friends from long ago, I might have sent letters, but it would have been far from efficient. I would have written the same things to each of them. The personal content of these letters would have been small compared to the informational pieces that would be the same in the other 14 letters. Facebook makes your information a kind of boilerplate. It becomes a given, so conversations with old friends can be a lot more productive when I do see those people. In a way, I never really lose my connection.

That feeling of social ties is the magic of a service like Facebook. My family, like a lot of other modern families, is spread out across the Unites States, from Florida to California. I also have family members overseas. I’m lucky if I see my entire family once a year. Yet, with the assistance of Facebook, I can apply the the same efficiency of staying connected with high school friends as with my family. My sister, for example, recently had her first child. I have met my niece only a handful of times since then, but she is constantly in my thoughts thanks to a stream of pictures and updates about how she’s doing. It’s a lot like the old family Christmas cards except it’s happening every single day of the year.

The Internet has come a long way in the last couple of decades, and we’re seeing some noticeable generational trends. For instance, one of my friend’s aunts “friended me” on Facebook, and I noticed that she had three times the number of Facebook friends as her nephew, despite the fact that she has only recently started to spend more time on the Internet. She spends more time on Facebook than he does. Yet he is part of the younger generation that grew up using the Internet.

The beauty of Facebook is in the packaging of the service. Almost every facet of Facebook is technology that existed from years before: e-mail, instant messaging, photo galleries, personal Web pages, RSS, etc. Facebook has taken these function, which young people have been able to do for the past decade, and made them more user-friendly, more accessible—for young and older generations alike.

Facebook is the second act in the people’s Internet Revolution; the first being America Online, which spurred the adoption of the Internet in the homes of ordinary Americans. In a similar fashion, Facebook is spurring the adoption of Internet use in demographics that have been dismissed as the non-Internet users. It gives people a reason to be online in a way that simply checking e-mail, the 1996 equivalent, did not. Facebook is active in a way that the general population may find more rewarding.

Instead of waiting for items to roll in addressed to you personally, as in the case of e-mail, you can take the initiative to find out about your friends without having to speak to them directly.

The ability to communicate (or not communicate) with your friends in different ways also heightens the ‘stickiness’ of the service. For example, it tells you who else is using Facebook right now. You can then exchange instant messages with any of them. There’s always one more thing to check, see, or do on Facebook. It’s like a never-ending dinner party and all your friends and family are invited.

Whether or not Facebook is a festive Christmas card or more of a raucous dinner party is up to the user (or non-user). Suffice to say, even if the Facebook service goes offline tomorrow, services like Facebook have changed the way we communicate in our society.

]]>For centuries, we’ve used telescopes to explore the earth and peer into space. Now, implantable telescope technology is on the horizon to help people with the leading cause of blindness to maintain their independence and get back to enjoying life.

The CentraSight implantable miniature telescope from VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies http://www.visioncareinc.net/technology is awaiting FDA approval as a permanent solution for the “blind spot” caused by the most advanced cases of age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

AMD progressively damages a specialized area of the retina tissue at the back of the eye that is responsible for “straight-ahead” vision and enables people to drive, recognize faces, read books and labels, and view television and computer screens. The investigational device works in tandem with the eye’s cornea to focus enlarged images over areas of the retina unaffected by the disease.

“One of my patients was unable to see the faces of her grandchildren, and because they are all blonde, she couldn’t tell them apart. After the CentraSight treatment, she was able to recognize them by name. She was also able to resume riding her bike, something she had stopped doing because she couldn’t tell if she was going to hit someone in front of her on the sidewalk!”

Ophthalmic surgeons implant the pea-sized device into one eye during an outpatient procedure that involves removing the natural lens. The untreated eye retains peripheral (side) vision for mobility and navigation. A vision-training program maximizes the ability to perform daily activities.

FDA approval is anticipated later this year, says Dr. Hudson. Clinical studies conducted at 28 leading ophthalmic centers and in more than 225 patients demonstrated statistically significant and clinically meaningful results.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/01/23/health-and-family/medical-update/minitelescopes-restore-eyesight.html/feed10The Post Celebrates American Ingenuityhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/26/in-the-magazine/people-and-places/post-celebrates-american-ingenuity.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/26/in-the-magazine/people-and-places/post-celebrates-american-ingenuity.html#commentsWed, 26 Aug 2009 13:38:07 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=10606We are a restless nation of tinkerers and doers, a people with an unparalleled passion to produce something new, but can such an explosion of creativity continue?

]]>June 1896: A 32-year-old, having left his parents’ Michigan farm to become an engineer and go to work for the greatest inventor of the age — Thomas Edison — has gotten restless again. He has decided he wants to get in on the invention of the automobile, a new kind of machine most Americans have never yet heard of. He has been putting one together in the shed behind his house. He read a magazine article about how to assemble an engine, and he constructed one that can get three horsepower. He made a transmission out of belts and chains. He set that machinery on a buggy with bicycle wheels and a bicycle seat. Now, at 3 a.m., he is ready to drive it. He opens the door to the shed, seats himself in the bicycle seat, and discovers that, in the heat of his passion, he neglected to make the car narrow enough to get out of the shed. He gets an ax and starts chopping down the wall around the door until he can get the buggy out. When he has removed enough shed, he starts up the car. It works. And the neighbors wonder what all that monstrous noise is at 4 a.m.

That man’s name was Henry Ford, and his first automobile ride launched a career that rivaled Edison’s own. The nation’s history is peppered with stories like that, of men and women swept up in inventing. Consider what America has produced ahead of other nations: high-pressure steam engines, continent-spanning railroads, the light bulb, the telephone, the motion picture, the airplane, FM radio, television, the atom bomb, the transistor, the personal computer, the Internet, a host of modern medicines and imaging machines, the credit card, the cell phone … and that list barely scratches the surface.

Why has this nation spawned such an unending, unparalleled outpouring of inventive creativity? There are two basic reasons: the people and the place.

The people because America has been a land of strivers, explorers, and dreamers since the first settlers landed on the East Coast — or even since the first intrepid Siberians walked over the long-gone land bridge to Alaska and began spreading south to Patagonia. This nation has been populated by people who were dissatisfied enough to turn their lives upside down in striking out for something new. That spirit became part of our national DNA.

You see it in an inventor such as Robert Fulton. Fulton, born into rural poverty in 18th century Pennsylvania, dreamed of getting rich as a portrait painter. He managed to get himself to London to study with some of the best artists living. After a few years, he knew he didn’t have the talent to become a great painter. He decided to become an inventor instead. He spent years trying to become an expert in canals, the high-tech fad of the moment. He got nowhere with that, either. Not one to give up, he then had the crazy idea of inventing the submarine and submarine warfare. He got both the British and French governments behind him at different times, convincing each he could enable it to defeat the other. Eventual failure again. Still he refused to accept a life without extraordinary accomplishment. He happened to meet the new American envoy to Paris, who had been granted a government monopoly to run steamboats on the Hudson River — if anyone could invent a steamboat that actually worked. Fulton said, “Of course, I’m your man.” And in 1807, he piloted the world’s first commercially successful steamboat and ushered in a new age.

October 1911, Dare County, North Carolina, USA. Orville Wright flies a glider over Kill Devil Hills. Image by Bettmann/CORBIS.

Not just the people of the land, but the land itself, too, had much to do with the firing of the nation’s creative imagination. When the Revolutionary War ended, the victorious new nation was impoverished and deeply indebted. England had used its colony as a source of raw materials and had discouraged manufacturing or any other kind of self-sufficiency. The population was thinly scattered across millions of acres loaded with potential materials of wealth — timber, coal, the power of falling water, undeveloped farmlands. There were, in short, too few people to make the most of the riches of the land, and none of those people were inclined to think of themselves as mere laborers. The situation was utterly unlike that in Europe, which was jammed with people able to do the work of making the most of limited resources.

America desperately needed labor-saving technology. It needed novel ways to multiply the capabilities of its sparse population. So the American people bent their will to accomplish that. In the first decades of the republic, a would-be schoolteacher from New England named Eli Whitney developed a simple engine, or “gin,” that made it possible for cotton to be produced in massive amounts across the deep South. After that he went on to pioneer the use of interchangeable parts that would give rise to the concept of mass production. A self-taught millwright in the mid-Atlantic named Oliver Evans dreamed up and built the first automated factory that could turn grain into flour without human intervention. A 21-year-old worker at one of England’s first mechanized textile mills slipped out of that country with all the details of the technology in his head — because it was kept a secret that couldn’t legally be shared with other nations — and started the first of the great cotton mills of New England.

The nation’s creative fecundity has not let up since. In fact, it has multiplied over time. By 1911, 1 million U.S. patents had been granted. By 1991, 5 million had. In 2006, patent number 7 million was issued.

It is part of the genius of America that the Framers authorized a patent system in the U.S. Constitution, as a necessary booster of creativity. A patent is basically a very simple thing, a government grant of exclusive rights to an invention in return for making the workings of that invention public knowledge. The exclusivity lasts for 20 years in order to give the inventor time to profit from his innovation. The publicizing of the details expands knowledge and thus promotes invention by others. Abraham Lincoln — the only U.S. president to hold a patent, for a device for getting boats over sandbars — once said, with characteristic eloquence, “The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.”

In the early days of the patent system, every application had to be accompanied by a model of the invention. That would be impossible nowadays, for there have come to be patents for nonmechanical things unimaginable in the first days of the republic — chemical processes, algorithms, software, even genes.

Can such an explosion of creativity continue, and continue to grow? No one can divine the future, but one thing is certain: The world is so complicated now, and the level on which most true technical innovation occurs is so advanced that the American imagination cannot maintain its productivity unless the nation has the best educational system possible. How important is the educational system? Even a century and a quarter ago, in the age of purely mechanical innovation, it could be crucial.
Consider the story of two young boys in Iowa in 1878.Their father was a minister, who, on a church trip, came across a toy that consisted of a stick with a kind of propeller at the top. You wrapped a rubber band around the stick, tightened it, and when you released it, the stick spun and flew up in the air. He brought the toy home to his two boys, who were 7 and 11. They were fascinated by it, and they started making copies of it.

One day Miss Ida Palmer, their teacher at the Jefferson School in Cedar Rapids, caught one of them at his desk fiddling with two pieces of wood. She asked him what he was doing. He said he was putting together the parts of a flying machine, and he added, to her disbelief, that someday he wanted to make a larger version that would make it possible for him and his brother to fly.

Miss Palmer reprimanded the boy, but she recognized something in his wild imagination — it contained the seed of something precious. She did not take away his toy. His enthusiasm was not dampened. And he later remembered, “We built a number of copies of this toy, which flew successfully. But when we undertook to build the toy on a much larger scale, it failed to work so well.”

The boys finally did make a bigger version that worked. The brother who was caught at school was Orville Wright. The other one was Wilbur Wright.

Frederick E. Allen is the former editor of American Heritage magazine and current leadership editor of Forbes.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/26/in-the-magazine/people-and-places/post-celebrates-american-ingenuity.html/feed0What Will They Think of Nexthttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/26/humor/what-will-they-think-of-next.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/26/humor/what-will-they-think-of-next.html#commentsWed, 26 Aug 2009 14:00:02 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=10135There’s nothing new under the sun. That may have been true centuries ago when the phrase was attributed to an unnamed philosopher, identified only as “the Preacher,” in the Book of Ecclesiastes; but since then, WOW! Innovations have been coming at us at the speed of light. Every time I think things have gone as […]

]]>There’s nothing new under the sun. That may have been true centuries ago when the phrase was attributed to an unnamed philosopher, identified only as “the Preacher,” in the Book of Ecclesiastes; but since then, WOW! Innovations have been coming at us at the speed of light.

Every time I think things have gone as far as they can, I remember the song from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma that proclaimed, “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City. … I counted 20 gas buggies goin’ by theirselves.

Almost every time I took a walk,” the singer reports. “An’ then I put my ear to a Bell telephone, an’ a strange woman started in to talk … they’ve gone about as fer as they can go.”

Hardly. Obviously, they’ve gone a heck of a lot “ferer.” Some “buggies” no longer need gas. They run on electricity. And no woman, strange or otherwise, talks to you when you pick up a telephone, Bell or not. At least not a live one. Most likely you’ll hear a recorded voice — not necessarily female. And that phone probably doesn’t even have a wire; but it does play music and take pictures and has a global positioning system and Internet access — and, who knows, soon maybe the ability to sprout wings and fly you to Mars.

The song continues: “They went an’ built a skyscraper seven stories high, about as high as a buildin’ otta grow …” Of course, today skyscrapers actually do scrape the sky, while back in Kansas City of yore, “With every kind of comfort every house is all complete. You can walk to privies in the rain and never wet your feet! They’ve gone about as fer as they can go …” Not quite. Indoor privies have since morphed into luxury spas, with giant Jacuzzis, tanning beds, toilets that flush automatically, and showers for two (or more) with dozens of power jets to spray.

All well and good, but I wish the brainiacs who developed these wonders would turn their attention to more practical areas — like designing a fitted sheet that will fold itself. I still have not figured out how to do it manually.

Also, how about a shopping cart that will survey your fridge and pantry, print out a shopping list of what you need, and maybe even roll
itself to the supermarket and collect your groceries. OK, so that may be a bit unreasonable. Actually, I would settle for a cart with wheels that all go in the same direction.

And I would really appreciate a dishwasher that loads and unloads itself and stows all the clean dishes, glasses, flatware, and pots and pans in their designated places.
Again, if that’s too much to ask, how about one that actually delivers on its promise to clean those pots and pans of burnt-on food without any help from me?

I do have a robotic vacuum cleaner, but I don’t know why. I don’t really trust it, so I go over all the rugs with my electric manual vac anyway. And I still have to dust. Will someone please design a feather duster that can flutter around on its own, cleaning every surface, nook, and cranny, including the ones I usually miss?

Oh, and you know what else would be great — houseplants with feet that could walk over to the kitchen sink and water themselves when they’re thirsty. All that droopy, dried foliage perched on various surfaces in my home does nothing to enhance its décor.

A self-balancing checkbook would be another dream come true. Sure, there are computer programs that are supposed to achieve this result, but not independently — you have to help it by activating the program and entering numbers and hoping the computer won’t crash before you’ve finished. Much too stressful. (Come to think of it, a crash-proof computer would be nice, too.)

And, yes, they’ve invented a car that can parallel park itself, but when will they give us one that will drive itself down the highway so I can concentrate on my cell phone calls, answer my e-mails on my laptop, and use both hands to eat my sandwich … without worrying that a cop is going to pull me over?

I know they’ve also developed a windproof umbrella that will not blow inside out, even in a hurricane. But better yet would be a sunshine bubble that would encase you and your car wherever you go so you’d never need an umbrella (or a coat or boots for that matter). A blizzard is raging, and you need milk and pork chops? No problem. Just activate your sunshine bubble, slip on your flip-flops, and you’re set to go.

Also near the top of my wish list is a magic wand that I can wave over my lasagna and hot fudge sundae to absorb all the calories. In the meantime, I’d like a scale that will lie and tell me I’ve finally lost those 20 pounds. And until someone develops a wrinkle cream that really works, how about a mirror that lies, too?

Actually, that calorie-absorbing magic wand is second on my fantasy list. I just decided that something else deserves the No. 1 position: You know how some TV shows pluck a plain “before” Jane from the audience and turn her into a gorgeous “after” by the end of the show? Well, I’d like a makeover booth that would do the same thing. I’d step inside, push a button, and out would pop robotic makeup brushes, hair styling tools, and Botox-loaded syringes that would whip around and do their magic while I took a 10-minute nap. Then, voilà! Me, “after”! At least I think it’s me — I really don’t recognize myself.

But back to more mundane matters: I’d really appreciate drawers and cupboards that organize themselves and closets that vaporize anything I haven’t worn in two years, as well as file cabinets that automatically shred contents I will never need again.

And is there a botanist out there who can develop grass that grows only a couple of inches high and never needs mowing or watering, but stays lush and green all summer? Oh, what the heck, all winter, too, while we’re at it.

Speaking of winter, will some climatologist please find a way to direct all snow only to the mountains to keep the skiers happy and off the walks and roadways to keep me happy?

The pundits say that a sure way to wealth is to find a need and fill it. There you go! I’ve identified lots of needs. The rest is up to you.

I’ll trust you to split the profits with me when they start rolling in.

Rose Madeline Mula does her thinking about new gadgets in Methuen, Massachusetts. Her latest book, The Beautiful People and Other Aggravations, is published by Pelican Publishing Company.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/26/humor/what-will-they-think-of-next.html/feed3Classic Covers: Children of Inventionhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/24/art-entertainment/beyond-the-canvas-art-entertainment/children-invention.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/24/art-entertainment/beyond-the-canvas-art-entertainment/children-invention.html#commentsMon, 24 Aug 2009 13:00:59 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=9285Our cover artists, quite inventive in their own right, have been chronicling America’s quirky new devices for decades. It’s kids, however, who take to the “new” at lightning speed. And kids are inventive, too. But kids in inventor mode, our artists suggest, can sometimes be unsettling.

]]>You may recall Rutherford B. Hayes’ comment after making the first ever presidential phone call on Alexander Graham Bell’s new telephone. “An amazing invention,” he said, “but who would ever want to use one?”

Our cover artists, quite inventive in their own right, have been chronicling America’s quirky new devices for decades. In observing our reactions to them, they have shown we are all pretty much like kids with new toys (with the exception of Rutherford B. Hayes, that is). It’s the kids, however, who take to the “new” at lightning speed, be it telephones, computers, or e-books. They garner new technologies for their own use, leaving their clueless elders far behind. And kids are inventive, too. But look out when they start thinking they are Henry Ford, the Wright brothers, or Alfred Nobel (inventor of dynamite). Kids in inventor mode, our artists suggest, can sometimes be unsettling.

]]>The United States is an innovative nation fascinated by new ideas and impatient for improvement. Innovation is a line that weaves throughout our history—an electrified kite string that becomes a high-voltage power line, a telegraph wire, an optical phone cable, and an antenna that eventually dissolves into a cloud of wireless information. Innovation is a view of our country from a speeding car, a 75th floor office suite, a commercial flight at 30,000 feet, or a lunar craft 230,000 miles from home.

More than any single individual, invention, technology, or improvement, true innovation is an ever-evolving process—the product of unfenced thinking and hard work.

The Post salutes the past, present, and future innovations that shape the way we live, work, and play.

1. Capturing Lightning

Ben Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was the first major innovator in America. Through his experiments and writings, he educated the world on the nature of electricity, how it was conducted, and how it might be stored. He also helped reconcile religious leaders to scientific truths. As Post writer and historian Samuel Eliot Morison observes, before Franklin, “it was generally supposed to be immoral to assert a scientific cause for phenomena such as earthquakes, shooting stars, and thunder and lightning. Thus, Franklin’s proof of electricity’s causing lightning … took out of the field of religion something earlier classified as a mere act of God and included it in natural science.” Franklin’s work as a diplomat for science inspired other Americans to wrestle new destinies from the elemental forces.

A pioneer in many fields, Nikola Tesla developed alternating-current technology — considered one of the greatest discoveries of all time by many — to supply power to factories. His breakthrough enabled electricity from a power plant to travel over long distances, reaching far into the country, instead of being restricted to the few blocks around a power plant. Later, in the 1960s, physicists Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley developed a replacement for the electronic vacuum tube. Their transistor, a small and simple device, marked the beginning of solid-state electronics and much smaller appliances. Televisions were no longer the size of washing machines. Portable radios could be hidden in a pocket. And computers shrank from the size of buildings to something that could slip down between the couch cushions.

Samuel Morse

2. Global Conversation

Samuel Morse wasn’t the only inventor working with telegraphy. But he was the first to offer a reliable, working system. In 1844 he demonstrated its efficiency in Washington by conversing with his associate in Baltimore 30 miles away. By the 1870s, Washington was telegraphing news to San Francisco, 2,400 miles away — a distance that required 60 days by coach. Years passed before Americans fully realized his accomplishment of removing the physical limits of exchanging thoughts. Communication traveled faster than the swiftest carriage or train. People could move ideas as quickly as they could think them.

As telegraph lines rose across the country, Alexander Graham Bell was filing his patent for a device to transmit the human voice. Early users felt shy about shouting into a receiver and listening through the static for a shouted reply, knowing that anyone in the neighborhood could quietly lift a handset and listen in. By the 1980s, this shyness had disappeared when Americans adopted Martin Cooper’s cellular phone. Telephone receivers shrank in size from a brick to a large earring, and it soon became hard not to listen to other people’s phone calls.

3. Americans Hit the Road

Henry Ford

Henry Ford did not invent the auto­mobile. His great innovation was introducing mass production to car manufacturing, launching an assembly line that enabled factory workers to build more than 18,000 cars in 1909. By 1920 Ford was selling about a million cars each year.

Americans adopted the automobile like a long-lost relative. People learned to drive, exploring the countryside and relocating when opportunity beckoned. They also began living farther from work, spawning the growth of suburbs.

America was expanding, both horizontally and vertically. Architect William Le Baron Jenney exchanged stone for metal frames and beams when he built Chicago’s Home Insurance Building in the 1880s. The 10-story structure weighed only as much as a three-story conventional building. Jenney’s success at 138 feet was doubled with the 285-foot Flatiron Building in 1902, and quintupled with the 1913 Woolworth Building. The horizon of cities rose and skyscrapers began dwarfing church steeples. In the wake of 9/11, few cities are planning to build skyscrapers that might draw the attention of terrorists. However, the Burj Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, upon completion, will reach 160 stories — half a mile high.

4. Illuminating the Country

Thomas Edison

While city dwellers ventured into the countryside, farm families migrated toward the city. Even though Thomas Edison regretted the shift, his work rendered it inevitable. Like most of his creations, the incandescent light bulb was a coincidental discovery. He discovered a workable filament for his light bulb by randomly trying thousands of materials before finding the answer in carbonized bamboo fiber.

With electric light, night lost its power to regulate Americans’ lives. Business operated around the clock. As Samuel Insull began building power plants across the Midwest, the faint glow of cities — once visible only in the eastern night sky — began to appear in the West.

Today, as cities grow brighter and the electric glow washes out the sky for miles, innovators are developing new light sources that cut down ambient lighting, focusing illumination where needed and reducing wasted light and energy demands.

5. Advent of Sound

American ingenuity was pushing back the silence of the frontier as well as its darkness. Edison discovered how to mechanically capture sound waves on wax and produced his “Ediphone,” which he intended to sell as a business dictation machine. Coincidentally, he discovered that his machine could record music.

True to form, Edison developed his sound machine through trial and error, without any underlying theory. And, just as typical, Edison stuck with his original ideas, using cylinder recordings — though discs were more practical — and personally selecting the music his studio recorded, despite his limited tastes and deafness in one ear.

Edison’s stubbornness created an opportunity that Eldridge Johnson seized when he founded the Victor Talking Machine Company. He brought a less expensive phonograph to the market and began recording a broader variety of music. His recording company achieved unimaginable success when, as an experiment, it began selling records of blues, jazz, gospel, and country music. The entertainment industry discovered a devoted following for music, a need largely ignored by polite society.

In the 1950s, engineers introduced long-playing records that offered more music with greater fidelity. At the same time, David Paul Gregg was busy working on his optical disc that used a laser to read audio data. Twenty years later, his development became the compact disc: a small, durable medium of complete fidelity that resisted scratches and static. Fifteen years later, the MP3 protocol compressed music into small computer files that could be transferred, stored, and played on miniature players. Today, Americans play more music than ever on personal MP3 players, which can be seen everywhere from the suburbs to the front lines in war.

6. Populating the Airwaves

As Edison pressed voices into wax cylinders, American scientists attempted to direct voices through the air. They experienced little success until Nikola Tesla, in 1895, developed the technology to transmit a sound signal from New York to West Point, 50 miles away. By the 1920s, radio amateurs were transmitting signals across the country and wracking their brains for broadcasting material. They read agricultural lectures, delivered sermons, relayed news from local papers, or played records. Several states away, enthusiasts fiddled with cat’s whiskers and coils on homemade sets, eager for any sound. Farm boys strung up wire to hear the talk and static of distant Chicago or New York.

Philo T. Farnsworth

Philo T. Farnsworth, a mathematical genius from Utah, successfully added a visual element to radio signals when he introduced the image dissector tube. The device, which he first built while in high school, enabled him to capture and transmit moving images. He broadcast America’s first television signal in 1927. The Radio Corporation of America eventually bought his patent and made the first public television broadcast from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The first regularly appearing television show hit airwaves in 1947. Television stations struggled by on little revenue, and early programming favored cheap entertainment.

While some were critical of the quality of programming, no one could deny that televisions had become more sophisticated. Today, companies sell 150-inch, high-definition TVs and are developing contact lenses that transmit television shows.

7. Moving Pictures

America quickly realized that television could not replace its favorite form of entertainment: the movies. America’s motion picture industry was among the largest and most profitable in the world. Its earliest incarnation was Edison’s Kinetoscope: a hand-cranked viewer that showed a few minutes of dancing, gymnastics, or people simply walking down the street. Yet this humble beginning sparked an immense appetite for film.

Edison began work on a projector that allowed crowds to watch the same images. But Edison’s greatest contribution to the new industry was a curious little production called The Great Train Robbery. The 10-minute drama—crude, choppy, and over-acted—inspired other innovators with the possibilities of cinema.

No less remarkable was the innovation of George Eastman. His Kodak camera company encouraged Americans to take up what had been the expensive hobby of photography. Customers bought his camera, containing enough film for 100 images. After the film was exposed, the photographer mailed the entire camera back to Eastman’s laboratories, which sent back the pictures and a reloaded camera. Personal photography ceased being a rarity.

Now, with digital cameras, photographers are pushing the limits of what can be captured. High-definition displays and computer enhancement give photographs a level of detail that extends the capabilities of the human eye.

8. America Takes Flight

The Wright brothers approached flight with the enthusiasm of hobbyists, but realized they would have to master the science of aerodynamics. They built from the ground up, testing everything, and often finding their textbooks wrong. The brothers worked relentlessly against limited information and slim funds, crouching in a shack on the North Carolina coast, as 70 mph-winds tore against their machine. Finally, in December 1903, they succeeded. A half century passed before air travel became affordable.

The Wright Brothers

Fascinated by the Wright brothers’ achievement, Americans failed to notice the work of another innovator. Robert Goddard grew up with a dream of traveling beyond Earth’s atmosphere, where aircraft could not depend on air resistance. Realizing that travel in the vacuum of space would require an engine to bring along its own oxygen, Goddard developed a rocket design that could carry its own fuel and created the multistage rocket that would jettison its own starter motor as it struggled against Earth’s gravity. In the 1930s, his research team was launching supersonic rockets 1.5 miles from earth. Almost predictably, he was discounted as a crackpot for talking about space travel, and the armed forces saw no military application in his missiles. Goddard died in 1945, just as America realized the vast potential of his work. Twenty-four years later, Americans crossed space, landed on the moon, and returned.

Enrico Fermi

9. Tapping New Energy

Early in his career, Italian born Enrico Fermi realized it was possible to control the disintegration of uranium and start a chain reaction that would release massive energy. Working with physicist Leo Szilard, Fermi achieved nuclear fission for the first time in 1942. His research led to the development of an atomic bomb for the United States military. After dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, Americans became deeply concerned about this new, nuclear science. In 1946, a Post editorial warned: “If we are not destroyed by our own curiosity and rising standards of destructiveness, we could drift along, constantly testing the warlike possibilities in the atom until some other nation got the secret.” The remark was highly prophetic. Russia developed nuclear weapons in 1949. But Fermi hesitated to build a nuclear device with greater power, believing that such a device could only result in genocide.

America’s fears over nuclear disaster overshadowed promising applications such as nuclear medicine. Data from nuclear imaging has saved countless lives by detecting cancerous growths in their early stages. Another development, nuclear power generation, continues to face criticism. Despite Americans uneasiness about nuclear energy, nuclear reactors generate nearly 20% of our country’s electricity. Innovators are looking beyond the large nuclear plants to the potential of scaled-down reactors for neighborhoods or individual houses, which would be smaller than a garden shed.

10. Outsourcing Brainwork

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak

While America’s attention focused on atomic power, a quiet innovation was underway that would prove even more powerful. George Stibitz was building a digital computer on his kitchen table. By 1940 the device could perform sophisticated mathematical calculations. While Stibitz used his computer to model biochemical systems in the human body, other innovators were looking at computer programs for more general interest.

Eventually, the personal computer (PC) made its debut in the late 1970s. At first a PC seemed as practical as a personal aerospace program. Yet innovators such as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak developed affordable computers for everyday business operations. In 1979 the duo created an operating system that didn’t use advanced logic and computer language. This development, along with practical programs for word processing and spreadsheets, encouraged America to incorporate digital technology in their lives.

Thousands of tinkerers and hackers played with digital systems, often with only a burning curiosity to see what they could do. A man named Bill Gates aided the effort. His genius for programming and business helped him build the Microsoft Corporation. Not only did Gates assist America’s programmers in developing software, he helped standardize the industry so different systems could converse in a common operating system.

11. Computer Age

When Lawrence Roberts developed a system for sending data packets between computers, he had little idea where the innovation would lead. He developed his computer network—the ARPANET—for the government. At first university researchers began using the network to share data. Then the public discovered it.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Soon after, thousands of people around the world began creating documents and programs that could be freely shared through the World Wide Web. Millions of Web sites appeared on computer screens, offering phone directories, encyclopedias, political commentary, and access to a vast global marketplace that never closes. In the 1990s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google, Inc. to help the world surf the rising ocean of information. Google would locate Web sites based on their titles or their contents, while also promoting new methods of sharing information — social networking, video sharing, music downloading, and free videophone service to anywhere in the world.

12. The American Voice

While all of these ideas shape the way we live, our greatest innovation is the rich and unique American culture — the confluence of our unique system of democracy, traditions, food, thought, language, and arts, over 20 generations, that has been exported, adopted, and imitated around the world.

From baseball to rodeos, Broadway musicals to demolition derbies, the Great American Novel to comic books, blue jeans to baseball caps, surfing in Malibu to singing at the Met, cooking in the French Quarter to dancing at the Zuni pueblo, American culture continues to shape the nature and pace of change around the globe.

Miles Davis

But perhaps nothing reflects the wealth of American culture like our music. It borrowed from the home cultures of its people to produce a sound unique to the world. American music’s mixed ancestry imbued it with unexpected charm and vitality. More than just a fortunate hybrid, American music was based on the blues scale — one of the most significant innovations in Western music. The blues spun off new music traditions with a strong family resemblance. We hear the distinctive blues tonal progression in gospel, bluegrass, jazz, country, rock, soul, and pop music. The distinctly authentic sound of the country created a family connection between Americans as diverse as Bessie Smith, Glenn Miller, B.B. King, Bruce Springsteen, Aaron Copland, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Irving Berlin, and jazz legend Miles Davis.

The genius of the American experiment is stated in our motto “e pluribus unum”—out of many, one. Our American culture enables us to share roots, while encouraging experimentation and growth—out of many comes many more.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/24/in-the-magazine/trends-and-opinions/12-innovations-changed-world.html/feed11Profiles in Creativityhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/24/in-the-magazine/people-and-places/profiles-creativity.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/24/in-the-magazine/people-and-places/profiles-creativity.html#commentsMon, 24 Aug 2009 13:00:40 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=9965The innovators we profile here hail from a wide variety of fields, but they have a few key attributes in common: a burning curiosity about the world; an unusual willingness to implement new concepts and ideas; and an unrelenting work ethic that enables them to turn mistakes into successes.

]]>What does it take to become a true innovator—to expand the borders of human knowledge to include new territory no one else thought existed? Natural talent is one variable, but it’s by no means the whole story. According to Boston College psychologist Ellen Winner, young prodigies—the types of kids who ace the SAT, for instance—often fail to develop into genuinely groundbreaking innovators. Because they’ve been so lavishly rewarded for mastering an existing domain, Winner’s theory goes, they may have less incentive to chart new territory.

Although the qualities that make a great innovator can’t be measured by standardized tests, they’re exemplified in the life stories of the foremost innovators in this country—inventors, composers, policymakers, and others who have beaten the odds to break new ground. The innovators we profile here hail from a wide variety of fields, but they have a few key attributes in common: a burning curiosity about the world; an unusual willingness to implement new concepts and ideas; and an unrelenting work ethic that enables them to turn mistakes into successes.

David Baker

David Baker knows a little something about thinking outside the box. As a high school student, he fell so deeply in love with music that he resolved to learn how to play the sousaphone, even though his school music department didn’t own one. “I took a cigar box, made holes in the top, put some springs and pieces of wood inside, and used that to learn the fingering for the tuba,” says Baker, now chair of the jazz department at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. “When the sousaphone finally became available, my band teacher, Russell Brown, was enamored that I was so serious about it.” Still, Baker remembers butting heads with Brown from time to time. “We were playing ‘Begin the Beguine,’ and I tried to play a boogie-woogie line. Mr. Brown said, ‘That’s not the way the line goes.’ I played the line again, and he was really getting angry. He said, ‘Boy, I don’t understand you. You run into a wall, and your solution is to run faster and hit harder.’ ”

Those early philosophies—pursue improvement at all costs and refuse to concede to an obstacle—would come to define Baker’s career as a musical innovator. An up-and-coming trombonist as a young man, he dreamed of achieving fame as a performer until a jaw injury sustained in an auto accident left him unable to play the instrument. “I thought it was the calamity of all calamities,” Baker says. But he now views this tragedy as a triumph: It forced him to find other ways to be creative, to give birth to the images in his mind. Following the injury, he learned to play a variety of other instruments and began experimenting with writing his own music. “If that [injury] hadn’t happened,” he says, “I wouldn’t have become a composer. No way.”

Baker’s professional reorientation jump-started a wild ride through the world of music, one that hasn’t yet come to a halt. In addition to writing scores for the New York Philharmonic and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Baker directs the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks

Orchestra and has won an Emmy Award. Part of his success comes from his willingness to entertain ideas that others may think are a little nutty. In his “Concertino for Cell Phones and Orchestra,” for instance, he incorporated ringtones into the score to harmonize with the orchestra, transforming orchestra-goers’ ultimate annoyance—a ringing cell phone—into an integral part of the music.

Although Baker’s original premieres have made a splash on many stages worldwide, he considers himself a teacher first and foremost. Interacting with students feeds his musical innovation, he says, because they encourage him to keep seeking out new ideas and new approaches. “To find something original, you take what you are and expand it to include all the new things that you know,” he says. “When I teach, I’m forever having to solve new problems. I’m so thrilled to be around young ideas.”

Dr. Peter Pronovost has long been haunted by the story of a little girl named Josie King, who died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 2001 from dehydration and an overdose of pain medicine. After Josie’s death, Pronovost, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, worked with her mother, Sorrel, to implement better safety programs at the hospital. “At one point,” recalls Pronovost, “she said, ‘Peter, can you tell me that Josie would be less likely to die today than she was four years ago? I want to know if care is safer.’ ”

Josie’s mother’s words have stayed with Pronovost, he says, because he believes all the well-meaning safety programs in the world mean nothing if they don’t make a measurable impact.

“The tragedy that befell Josie King had a devastating effect on our institution and was, and still is, a reminder of how
important patient safety and quality work is for Johns Hopkins and for every hospital in the world,” says Dr. Pronovost.

This keen focus on practicality, on quantifying and achieving results, has been the hallmark of Pronovost’s career. Determined to save patient lives that were being needlessly lost because of negligence and human error, he devised a concrete series of safety checklists for doctors and nurses to follow. To prevent a common cause of illness—bloodstream infections related to catheters inserted into a blood vessel with a direct line to the heart—doctors had to:

Wash hands using soap or alcohol prior to placing the catheter.

Wear a sterile hat, mask, gown, and gloves and completely cover the patient with sterile drapes.

Avoid placing the catheter in the groin.

Clean the insertion site on the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic and apply a sterile dressing over the insertion site once the catheter is in.

Remove the catheter when it is no longer needed.

The system was simple enough, but to implement it, Pronovost had to upend some of the prevailing tenets of health care culture. “I said, ‘Nurses, I want you to supervise the doctors to make sure they’re using the checklist.’ You would have thought it was World War III. The doctors said, ‘There’s no way you can have a nurse second-guess me in public.’ ” In hopes of forging a consensus, Pronovost brainstormed a way to appeal to the doctors’ and nurses’ shared interests. “I pulled everyone together and I said, ‘Is it tenable that we can harm patients in health care?’ They said, ‘No.’ I said to the doctors, ‘Unless it’s an emergency, the nurse is going to correct you.’ When it was framed that way, as a common goal, the conflict just melted away.” Pronovost’s unifying efforts paid off. When Michigan hospitals put his checklists in place, central line infection rates plummeted nearly 66 percent, saving about $175 million in health care costs. Other doctors and hospitals began following Pronovost’s example, and in 2008, he was named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

As impressive as his accolades are, Pronovost has never lost sight of the importance of getting other people on board to create a lasting transformation—a policy he’s put into practice in his own family as well. “I went to my kids and said, ‘How am I doing as a dad? What could I do better?’ ” he says. “Their insights were spot-on. My son said, ‘Dad, get on my level. Just put your BlackBerry away and play with me.’ ”

Dean Kamen may be best known as the inventor of the Segway—the two-wheeled human transporter—but he’s far from a one-hit wonder in the world of innovation. The New Hampshire entrepreneur has amassed a formidable oeuvre of technological advances, from an all-terrain electric wheelchair to a water purification system for Third World villages that runs on a Stirling engine. But Kamen doesn’t invent just for the sake of creating new things. All of his ventures spring from his desire to make people’s lives better in a concrete way. “In order for an invention to become an innovation,” he says, “you have to have such a compelling story that people are willing to say, ‘Yesterday, this is what I did and how I did it, but this represents such a big improvement that I am willing to change.’ ”

Kamen’s obsession with change and innovation came gradually. He wasn’t a tinkerer as a child, but he did have one standout trait: an insatiable curiosity about the natural world. “I asked myself things like, ‘Why does hot chocolate cool off if you don’t drink it quickly?’ There were so many things that seemed so predictable and yet so inexplicable, and I wondered how all of this happened.”

Once Kamen realized that inventing new products involved understanding these laws of nature and applying them through engineering, he was off and running. He derived special pleasure in finding unexpected uses for existing technology. When his older brother was in medical school and designing drugs to help babies with leukemia, Kamen realized available drug delivery systems were too large and began devising a solution. “I went down to the basement and built him the equipment he needed: tiny pumps that would deliver a very small amount of drug,” he remembers. “Then one of the professors my brother was dealing with said, ‘That little pump is so small you could put it on your belt or put it in your pocket.’ ” Inspired, Kamen used the mini-pump technology he’d developed to create the first portable insulin pump—now used by diabetics around the world.

Aspiring innovators, Kamen believes, would do well to adopt this kind of flexible mind-set. It’s important for ambitious creators to get comfortable with end-arounds, unexpected eurekas, and periodic failures, he says, because the ride is bound to be a bumpy one. To that end, Kamen founded FIRST, a high school robotics competition designed to give students a firsthand taste of what the innovation process is like. “I think the public has this perception that inventors run around with great ideas, get the parts, and make the product. But the process of inventing couldn’t be further from that—it’s not a linear, straightforward process. You have to be willing to adapt your ideas quickly, no matter how passionate you are about them, and just keep chipping away.”

From an early age, Esther Takeuchi liked to get into just about everything—whether that meant peeling apart golf balls or exploring inside the walls. “My father was an electrical engineer, and I would follow him around the house,” she remembers. “Whatever he did, I would do.”

Takeuchi, now an engineer at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has parlayed her penchant for figuring out how things work into a wildly successful career. She holds over 120 patents—more than any other woman alive—and has received multiple regional Inventor of the Year awards. While working at the technology company Greatbatch, she developed the Lilliputian battery that powers implantable cardiac defibrillators, a scientific leap forward that has improved the lives of thousands of patients.

Perfecting her most famous invention, Takeuchi says, proved a long, slow slog. “The battery didn’t leap forward fully formed—a lot of steps led to the development and improvement of the technology.” She doesn’t discount the importance of split-second inspiration, but emphasizes that innovators need to lay an extensive groundwork of knowledge to pave the way for that eureka moment. “What was important was spending time thinking about the problem and reading about it. Sometimes I would set the problem aside, and at the strangest moment it would occur to me, ‘Hey, we could do it this way.’ But being diligent in exploring the problem—that part is a disciplined process.”

After a successful career in the industry, Takeuchi returned to academia in 2007 for two reasons: to pursue more freewheeling research on ways to improve battery performance and to help equip the next generation of innovators in a time of increasing global competitiveness. “The United States is just an unbelievable country—there’s such a tradition of innovation and great thought. But I do have concerns about how the United States is going to remain competitive, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can contribute to that.’ ”

Although Takeuchi believes inspiring teachers can help spur youthful creativity, she also thinks the government needs to pitch in by delivering sustained funding for science to help the country shift its focus toward innovation. “We have bright, diligent, motivated young people, but what fields are they
attracted to? We need to value, as a society, the contributions that scientists, engineers, and technical educators make.”

Van Jones

Van Jones. Photo courtesy Richard Hume/Experience Life Magazine.

Several years ago, Oakland, California, lawyer Van Jones found himself at a career crossroads. “As an attorney, I was focused on trying to keep kids out of trouble, and I just burned out,” he says. Discouraged and not knowing exactly what he was going to do next, Jones set out to learn more about cutting-edge environmental business. “I discovered a lot of really cool technology—solar companies, organic food companies. I said, ‘This is great stuff, but none of it’s happening in the neighborhoods where I’m doing my work.’ ”

That initial epiphany—that residents of cash-strapped urban areas could form the foundation of a future green-collar economy—launched Jones on a quest to make his vision come true. “It’s a tremendous asset, the pent-up desire for positive change in urban communities,” he says. “You have all these people that need work and all this work that needs to be done.” To that end, Jones founded Green for All, a non-profit organization designed to combat poverty and build a green economy at the same time. Word about Jones’ grassroots venture spread among national movers and shakers, and thanks in part to Green for All’s inspiring example, President Obama budgeted more than $4 billion for green job creation and training as part of his 2009 economic stimulus plan. In March, Obama also named Jones the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s special advisor on green jobs. In addition to providing urban residents with a much-needed livelihood, Jones says, Obama’s new program will help enable the United States to compete with the rest of the world in the green-jobs sector. “This is one of those moments where the United States gets to choose: Do we want to have these jobs in our country, or only see them in other countries?”

The experience of turning his career crisis into a national-scale coup has steeled Jones’ determination not to let negativity block his future path, a philosophy he’ll adhere closely to as the Obama administration attempts to turn its green-jobs plans into reality. “My biggest asset is my innocence, and I treasure it. I went down that whole cynical pathway—too cool for school—and it didn’t make a difference for anybody I cared about,” he says. “So I had to reclaim that innocence. When I started working in politics, it was because I thought we could make a better society. You’ll never get me to give up on what I want this country to be.”

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/24/in-the-magazine/people-and-places/profiles-creativity.html/feed0Innovation’s Coolhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/24/post-fiction/classic-fiction/innovations-cool.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/24/post-fiction/classic-fiction/innovations-cool.html#commentsMon, 24 Aug 2009 14:00:02 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=9212“When I was a young man, as young men will do, I loved innovation. Obsessed by the new, I would welcome each new thing as it came along.” Poetry by Charles Osgood.

]]>When I was a young man, as young men will do,
I loved innovation. Obsessed by the new,
I would welcome each new thing as it came along.
The attraction was so unbelievably strong
That I just couldn’t wait to go try for myself
The latest and greatest to hit the store shelf.

And as I suspected, the minute I’d try it,
I could not resist the temptation to buy it.
For I knew that the new thing would bring
about change.
Looking back, I admit that it seems a bit strange;
How the words “new” and “change” had such
magic appeal then.
But when you are young, you can’t help how you
feel then.

So I was all for it, and in that pursuit,
I acquired that fashionable new Nehru suit.
With my sense of the future, I realized, I guess,
Guys would always be dressing that way, more or less.
It just didn’t work out in that way somehow.
Millions of Nehru suits, where are they now?

As years before, I was quick to order
That audio breakthrough,
The wire recorder.
The LPs, 33 1/3 rpm,
No more 78s;
It was better than them.
And whatever happened,
It still is a riddle,
To the 45s with the big hole in the middle?

I was the very first guy on the block,
You will not be surprised,
It won’t come as a shock,
To go quadraphonic — I was into “quad,”
Which came and went quickly,
And though it seems odd,
I really believed I would be in great shape
With eight gorgeous channels of stereotape.

I remember the thrill of my Polaroid camera,
3D movies at drive-ins, and Cinerama.
The Gershwins warned us in a song
A good, longtime ago:
“The radio and the telephone
And the movies that we know
May be passing fancies and in time may go.”

They haven’t gone completely; they have obviously not.
But it’s also true that all of them sure have changed a lot.
Radio and television still both keep on giving.
(Thank goodness, or I don’t know what I’d do to make
a living.)
That is a reality nobody can ignore.
Change still comes today, even more quickly than before.

I’m not a young man anymore.
We are grandparents now.
But we have such simple pleasures
As our ages will allow.
We love seeing our grandkids,
But please don’t stereotype,
Not on our laps, but laptops
With a little help from Skype.

From anywhere around the world,
I watch lots of baseball, too.
It’s amazing with a SlingBox the things
you can do.
I’ve got pictures on my iPhone
And my iPod music, too.
So I haven’t changed that much, you see,
And I’m nobody’s fool.
I’m still into exciting things.
Innovation’s cool!

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/24/post-fiction/classic-fiction/innovations-cool.html/feed0Offbeat Inventionshttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/20/in-the-magazine/trends-and-opinions/offbeat-inventions.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2009/08/20/in-the-magazine/trends-and-opinions/offbeat-inventions.html#commentsThu, 20 Aug 2009 13:00:54 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=9631Every so often, mankind comes up with a really good invention. The wheel, the light bulb, and the Internet are all examples of innovations that have changed our daily lives. However, the U.S. Patent Office has issued over 7.5 million patents, and not all of them are quite so celebrated. Some good, some bad, and some downright wacky! The Post lists some of the more unusual ideas that have come along.

]]>Every so often, mankind comes up with a really good invention. The wheel, the light bulb, and the Internet are all examples of innovations that have changed our daily lives. However, the U.S. Patent Office has issued over 7.5 million patents, and not all of them are quite so celebrated. Some good, some bad, and some downright wacky! The following lists some of the more unusual ideas that have come along.

Beerbrella
Keeping beer cold on a hot day is an age-old problem, and the beerbrella is a humorous attempt to solve it. It is simply a miniature umbrella that fastens to the brew to block out those hot sun rays. Unfortunately, there is a design flaw: The umbrella creates a physical barrier to drinking the beer, and someone who has had a few too many may put an eye out with the thing.

Mouseblaster
In 1882, a patent was issued for an unconventional mousetrap. The design was simple: a mousetrap was connected to a loaded handgun, so that when the poor rodent took the bait, it was blown to smithereens. “Yeehaw! No more stinkin’ varmints!” Although the Mouseblaster has obvious safety issues and may be a bit overzealous, it was probably a very effective exterminator.

Portable Automobile Partition
Long road trips can be a trying time for parents. If the kids aren’t asking for a bathroom break every 10 minutes, they are poking, tickling, and generally annoying each other. The Portable Automobile Partition provides an unsubtle solution. It is a transparent divider that is placed in the middle of the backseat to halt bickering, allowing parents to enjoy elusive serenity.

Snake Leash
In 2002, a patent was issued for a snake-walking leash. There are at least three major problems with this idea. 1) Dog leashes fit securely between the head and shoulders. A snake does not have shoulders, so it might slither away. 2:) “Walking the snake” is an oxymoron. 3) Dogs are OK for public places because they are social animals, and people like them. Snakes are not OK for public places because they are not social, and some people are terrified of them.

Mouth Cage
It is easy to see why this weight-loss contraption did not gain popularity after it was patented in 1982. This cage, which is strapped over the mouth and padlocked, is quite intimidating and would probably frighten small children. The problems, however, are more than cosmetic. While the design prevents its wearer from eating junk food, which is good, it also prevents its wearer from eating anything at all, which is not healthy. Also, what if someone loses the key?

Big Daddy Driver™
This unconventional golf club may save its owner a stroke or two. Although the Big Daddy Driver™ fits in the golf bag and looks like a driver, it is really a weed eater. When a shot is sliced into deep rough, the golfer opens the club head and starts weed-whacking away, turning a difficult shot into a piece of cake. A true golf fan may even perfect his swing the next time he is doing yard work!

Stadium Helmet
Americans are known for our love of sports. Unfortunately, good tickets to games are expensive, and some fans have to sit in the nosebleed sections. This invention, patented in 2000, is designed for these fans. Featuring a built-in radio, flip-up binoculars, a cooling fan, and a helmet for falling peanut debris, this innovation transforms the stadium experience.

The Petter
Man’s best friend has always provided us with great companionship and unconditional love. Regrettably, some of us can’t return the favor because we are busy and overworked. The Petter was invented so that our dogs won’t get so lonely. It is a mechanical arm that pets the dog when the master is not around. Nothing says love like the rigid embrace of a cold, steel, artificial arm.

Wake N’ Bacon Alarm Clock™
When you think about it, waking to the dreadful, blaring noise of an alarm clock is a terrible way to start the day. However, this ingenious device could change that. To use, you simply put bacon in a built-in tray, set the alarm, and go to sleep. The next morning, you wake up to the smell of freshly cooked bacon. Who said there’s no time to eat breakfast?

Stencil Hat
This invention exists for the fans that are too die-hard for jerseys, t-shirts, or foam No. 1 fingers. For those of us who really want to support our team, the stencil hat is a must-have. It is a regular ball cap with a cutout in it, so that the wearer can sunburn the home team’s logo onto his forehead. Hey, nobody said dedication was easy.

Portable Office Tie
There are certain things that a good businessman needs to have on him at all times. However, a briefcase can be big and clunky, and a man-purse is socially unacceptable. The Portable Office Tie is an ingenious solution to this problem. It is a conventional necktie that holds business cards, pens, paperclips and more. A simple flip of the tie provides business essentials, and its user is hands-free.

Image courtesy Throx, LLC

Throx™
Another age-old dilemma is the missing sock. Unlike clothes hangers, which seem to multiply in the closet, socks seem to disappear each time you do the laundry; and a sock missing its partner is a sad thing indeed. Inventor Edwin Heaven has come up with a practical solution to the problem—Throx™. His company distributes socks in three’s so that the missing sock has a backup.

Human Bird Feeder
People have always admired the gracefulness and beauty of birds, and bird watching is a popular hobby. Unfortunately, getting up close and personal is a challenge. That is, until now. In 1999, a patent was issued for a helmet with birdfeeders attached to it. Although there may be a design flaw (turning the head to see the birds would probably startle them), this innovation could change the whole complexion of bird watching.

Toilet Lock
In 1969, a patent was issued for a really bad idea- the toilet seat lock. First of all, fishing for your keys when you have to go seems very unpleasant. Then there is the possibility of losing the key altogether. What about guests? It seems weird that they would have to ask permission for the bathroom. Not the least of the problems is the cleanup after someone could no longer hold it. Of course, there is the ultimate question: Why would you lock it in the first place?